The woman’s brown wool skirt and tailored olive green jacket made Joe La Croix think of a Scottish huntress, though he’d never been to Scotland much less hung out with the hunting set there. She was forty, forty-five, solid, handsome and horse-y. She strode straight to the licensing desk — licenses for her hounds, he’d guess, or big speckled pointers with velvety ears and deafening bays. In line, she grasped her saddle-brown leather shoulder bag, poised to produce necessary documents and cash. How could she know that the new computer system befuddled all, and the simplest dog tag took fifteen minutes?
Joe turned away and pushed through glass doors to the interior courtyard of the Prairie Street Animal Shelter. Here, sun and fresh air diluted the pervasive scent of disinfectant and animal waste. Otherwise, the concrete slab with its scraggly petunia beds was good for nothing but pacing and smoking. Joe paced only; he’d been off the butts for three months now, had yet to devise a new ten-minute break. After, he’d head out to San Fernando to relieve a Mr. Frasier of a trapped possum, and on the way back, stop in Atwater to scrape up a flattened crow at the corner of Brunswick and Dover. Put that off long enough, the crow’d be an oil spot.
On each revolution, the Scotswoman snagged his attention, as had several other women lately, as if the sorrow binding him had begun to sag, and the gaps now admitted this or that woman, although precisely what attracted him in each, Joe could not yet say. He looked now in part to assess his new affinities.
After a lifelong penchant for pallor and gauntness — which had culminated in a dozen years with Laurianne, the longest living dialysis patient (their joke) — it would seem he now selected for vigor, even plumpness, though not, curiously, youth. Nor — equally odd — was there any maternal tint. This one, for example, seemed spinsterish, dyke-ish. Or so long married, she’d drifted into tweed, knee boots, androgyny.
Almost certainly this woman would disapprove of him. Disapproval was one thing Joe La Croix, animal control officer, sharpshooter, the city’s main trapper, breathed like air; it usually meant that he was doing something right. Those who disapproved of his methods usually were so ignorant about animal control, the merest whiff of their dismay fed his sense of superiority.
What will you do with it now that you’ve trapped it?
Euthanize it, ma’am.
Why can’t you just take it somewhere else and let it go?
Well, for starters, 98 to 100% of relocated wildlife doesn’t survive.
But at least it’s more natural.
And slow starvation is more natural than what?
Now, through the glass doors, blocking his view of the licensing desk, came Regine, with her clipboard, big schnoz and tiny ribcage. Regine was a volunteer, a dog rescuer, his best friend. She fell in beside him, got down to business. “Those puppies from the park — long exposure?”
“Naw, or the coyote’s would’ve gotten ‘em.” Set out by owners too poor to vaccinate and too tenderhearted to drown, the five black pups were six weeks old, the usual ghetto mix, pit bull, chow, and/or rott, snot-eyed, crawling with fleas. They should’ve been the coyotes’ breakfast, but the calls had kept coming; joggers with cell phones — did they have animal reg on speed dial? Four calls. So he’d trundled up and fetched ‘em.
“Just when we were getting ahead,” Regine said. “Dammit.”
Getting ahead for Regine meant more adoptions than euthanasias. Her world was full of criminals, mostly people who allowed puppies to be born.
“Hell, I’ll take one…” He eyed her sideways.
“You!” An impressive snort.
No fenced yard, no one home from seven to seven, plus he’d feed ‘em table scraps, let ‘em ride in the back of the truck, walk ‘em off leash, and shoot a biter faster than you could say nine-one-one. Joe flunked the pet adoption test without ever taking one. That had been another joke between him and his wife, Laurianne, back when they had their jokes: Joe La Croix failing the rescue test.
Regine cocked her head. “That’s you,” she said.
He heard it then, over the p.a. “Joy La Croy to licensing. Joy La Croy…”
* * *
Speaking of rescue, the Scottish hunt lady desired a license not for dogs, but to rescue squirrels. Poor Tony at the computer had never heard of such a thing. Plus his spelling was off, he’d added a second l, so the computer was delivering error messages and empty search results.
Joe pressed the right keys and stood to one side. Her name was Carla Cordero. Ms. Ridgeview Terrace in Echo Park. Work phone same as home. “How many squirrels do you have?” Joe asked.
“Three adults. Three pups.” No wedding ring. “So, six.”
“Need any cages?”
“I’m set, thanks.” She had a low laugh. “I even built ‘em a shade arbor.”
What the hell was a shade arbor? “Sounds like a regular operation.”
“State of the art. You should see it.”
“I’ll have to,” he said. “For you to get that license.”
This was not strictly true; inspections of rescue operations were not required unless there’d been a complaint. But Joe wanted to determine what called to him. Although “state of the art” rankled some.
He named a time two days away. Back in his truck, he looked up her address in the street atlas. Close by, up narrow jerky streets, not a place you could cruise undetected in the official truck bustled with many vented boxes.
The next day, however, a coincidence: at the end of his shift, he got a call for Ridgeview Terrace. Not her, though. This was a feral cat in a garage. He wended up into the view properties where, between houses, he could see to Mount Washington, Pasadena, the San Gabriel Mountains. Ms.Cordero’s house, he noted, was a shingled Craftsman behind a stand of yellow-green bamboo. Darn rare air up here. Why a woman living at this altitude harbored rodents was beyond his ken.
The elderly woman who called about the feral cat met him on her driveway. “He’s been driving my cats crazy, they’re afraid to go out into their own yard,” she said. “I’ve tried to trap him for weeks. “ She opened a side door and armed with a net, Joe entered a musty wood-beamed garage befogged by stinging, skunky tomcat musk. The tom with its torn flat ears had backed into a corner atop a cluttered workbench. He emitted low growls at regular intervals.
“I know, ole guy, I know,” Joe muttered, then swung, netting a writhing ball of fury. Claws broke through the mesh like thorns. Joe carried him out, shook him into an open compartment on the truck. “Sorry bub, but you can’t cat round the rich peoples’ pussies.” Caged, tom spat like distant gunfire.
Joe dropped him off at Prairie Street then drove through sluggish afternoon traffic to the florists by the cemetery in Glendale. He bought gerbera daisy bouquets, one red, one orange. His mother’s ashes were in a small marble drawer in the mortuary wall. He removed last week’s withered lilies from the attached bronze vase, and gave her the red daisies. Up on the north hill facing York Boulevard, he cleaned out the glass vase canted against Laurianne’s stone at a nearby faucet, and stuffed in the orange.
Home he drove through worse traffic to the duplex where his mother’s fourth husband, the ancient and spiteful Marino, lived alongside him, making for two long-faced sorry widowers under the same roof. Joe’s mother, May, had bought the place for the four of them — Marino and herself, Joe and Laurianne — never envisioning this configuration of tenants; her oversized Cajun son; her tiny, mean Calabrian husband.
Joe dragged a liter of Coke from the fridge and swigged from the bottle while plunking out partial melodies on the battered Steinway upright. He’d started playing, if you could call it that, after Laurianne passed. The combination of handwork and noise, however baleful, provided just enough distraction to allow for thought without excessive pain. He could pick out tunes — the piano, was very logical; the notes were in the same place each time he went for one.
Part Two
Laurianne. That’s what he thought about, still, all the time, when he played, and when he didn’t. He’d think about her, he knew, till he was done, and hoped that day would come soon. Having been so entwined when she lived, he had to reverse it, unwind himself, disentangle strand after strand of fine, barely perceptible attachment now that she was gone. However much he longed to be shed of it, he couldn’t will his mind away from its exhausting loops and snarls.
Laurianne. He’d fallen hard for her in high school, when his bayou accent, girth and bashfulness allowed only a few muttered greetings and one bold move: once, he drove her home from a football game.
After graduation, he got a job picking parts at a wrecking yard not far from her house. Each time he cruised her street, his head swiveled as if magnetized toward her family’s modest stucco home. Ten years of casual drive-bys and he finally saw her outside watering bushes. Heart thundering, hands shaking, he pulled over. In fact, Laurianne’s sister was manning the hose, but she directed Joe around the corner to a crappy little back house where Laurianne was recovering from a rejected kidney transplant.
He hadn’t even heard she was sick, hell, he hadn’t seen her since high school. But her wan face lit up when she recognized him, and she instantly grasped his hand, drew him to her, and who had ever, ever been so happy to see him? She got dressed for the first time since she got out of the hospital, and they walked down the block to a tiny park where they sat on a bench and fell in love. In retrospect, he was astonished how swiftly his fate had been sealed. They took a walk, fell in love and then, to clinch the deal, he saved her life.
Not two days after that fateful walk, he’d come by after work to find her fevered and in terrible pain. He drove her to the doctor’s, where a nurse inadvertently pulled out her shunt. He can still see the shunt with its long blood-slicked wire dangling at the end of an IV tube, and across the examining room, the doctor gaping, and Laurianne’s eyes rolling back in her head. He’d lifted her in his arms, shoved past the stunned doctor and shunt-holding nurse, and drove five blocks to the emergency room where everybody said he’d saved her life with at most two or three minutes to spare.
He must have saved her for something, and surely that something was his own tender use.
He landed on a pretty chord, all ten fingers on different keys, no dissonance.
Laurianne was the first person to see him as a man with skills, to suggest that his boyhood abilities — the shooting, trapping, and tracking abilities imparted by his papa back in St. Bernard’s Parish — could free him from the wrecking yard. Animal reg was her idea. She’d crammed him for the civil service exam, his score came back higher than either dreamed possible. Joe, who’d never done a lick of homework in his life, was amazed to see what studying could do.
He fit in at the agency from day one, where his evident delight in the work endeared him to his colleagues. Then, his cachet rocketed during the coyote scare in Toyon Canyon in the mid-nineties. A large number of yearling males were spotted in the hilly suburbs. A little too cocky, the wild dogs cantered down cul de sacs in broad daylight, drank from swimming pools, helped themselves to garbage and pet food and then to pets. Complaints came in, people were afraid for children. Too many coyotes, too bold, too fearless. Joe knew the research: nobody and nothing could eradicate or even diminish the coyote population, but the canny creature’s interface with humans could be made considerably less pleasant — for the coyote, that is. A child was bitten, or snapped at, it was unclear, and Joe went to work. He trapped and euthanized four, shot three others. (In the same three weeks, his four co-workers together bagged one.) Joe was in the paper, then and since, as the agency’s urban coyote expert. He still played cat and mouse with one old male in Franklin canyon who tripped his traps. Backed up his mange-riddled ass and shat on the bait.
Joe’s work was rewarded with the fanciest dog-catching, cat-rescuing, dead skunk-disposal truck in the agency. Around this time, his mom bought the duplex and he and Laurianne left her cramped back house and moved in next door. Those were the good years. Laurianne was having two good days to one bad — they called that last twelve hours before dialysis ‘toxic time,’ even sang about it, back when they still sang to each other. Living on toxic time…
He found the tune on the piano, briefly.
He drove her to and from dialysis, often with a raccoon or dog scratching in the boxes. He tidied up their half-a-house, ran the vacuum, cooked, did dishes. He’d felt good about himself back then. Who knew dumb old Joe La Croix could make such a damn good living, and give so much to another person.
Joe plunked on the piano until Marino turned his television up so high the sheetrock between them buzzed. Joe shut the lid over the keys and within minutes, the TV went off too. Such was the Joe-Marino interface.
Part Three
“Come in, come in,” Carla Cordero said and led him into a room with dark green walls, large rumpled couches, wood floors. The panoramic plate-glass view featured Mount Baldy like some snow-shouldered God to the east while just below, the L.A. River ran in a black stream in its concrete chute. On the far bank sat the flat, virtually tree-free grid of Joe’s own low rent neighborhood.
She viewed the view with him. “This is why I bought the place. And that’s why, for all the headaches it gives me, I haven’t burnt it down.”
He was creaking, belt, holster, shoes.
“Would you like something to drink? Iced tea? Water?”
“Water, thank you,” he said, turning back to the calm clean room. Waiting, he studied a cluster of small landscape paintings. A shaggy eucalyptus grove. Green hills and belted cows under thunderheads. A blue-hued moonlit plain. He’d gladly be in any of those places.
A water dispenser glubbed somewhere, and Ms. Cordero reappeared backlit, a silhouette, wide at the hips. Her breasts were ample, who wouldn’t notice? He accepted the tumbler of Sparkletts. To say she was fat would be an exaggeration. To say she was the plumpest woman Joe was ever drawn to was accurate. He’d never touched a woman who wasn’t skinny, dangerously so. Not that he’d touched a lot of them. Only two before Laurianne.
“I like this room,” he said. “Peaceful.”
“Isn’t it? Here, let’s go out this way.”
He followed. Her red t-shirt was long-sleeved and tight, her dark slacks snug, her butt rolling up toward her spine with each step. Had she dressed for him? The Scottish huntress vibe had morphed into a more conventional sexy severity — schoolteacher, say.
The yard ran down the hill in three terraces, the first half patio, half lawn. On the grass, a man on his knees worked on a sprinkler head. “Here’s Rodrigo,” she said. “The garden genius.”
Rodrigo saluted them with his screwdriver.
On the next level, four steel cages sat on a waist-high scaffold under a newly constructed, shingled structure. The famous shade arbor. The posts were redwood, the shingles cedar, the carpentry far better than it needed to be. Hell, the jutting beams were canted like those of the Craftsman above, and the arbor’s inhabitants shared their benefactor’s view. “They get a little morning sun, then full shade after eleven,” said Ms. Cordero.
“Nice set up,” he said. Could he be envious of squirrels?
“Oh, thanks, thanks so much. They’re just being shy right now.” Indeed, the squirrels scolded unseen from within their boxes. “Have you spent much time with squirrels?” she said.
“Some,” he said. As a boy, he ate them as often as pork chops. Here, at his mother’s behest, he’d shot some garden marauders. Lately he’d regularly peeled ‘em off the streets.
“Well then you know how funny and personable they are.”
“I got a big old orange tree at home,” said Joe. “They pull off the fruit up high and throw it to the ground to eat. They look like kids hurlin’ beach balls.”
“How adorable!”
“They can peel an orange in about five seconds, ever seen ‘em?”
“Yes! I love that,” she said, and pointed into the first cage. “Here’s Bumpy. I find their individual personalities more distinctive and than cats’.”
Joe ducked to peer at the indicated animal. The adult squirrel stood with his arms hanging at his sides, his mouth down-turned, quivering. He looked like a little old man with nothing to do; a peaceable, drab, disapproving creature. Joe gazed then into the wet black eye, and received in return a look so sharp, accusing and pitiless, it pierced his soul.
He remembered: His mother, May, was dead. Dead of a month-long stomach ache. And Laurianne, too, gone on his watch!
What was he doing here, at this woman’s house? His presumption suddenly shamed him, as did the old squirrel who loosed a torrent of ill-natured squawks and chutters. Joe stepped back, blinked, tried to focus. The sun was strong. Ms. Cordero was talking, perhaps had been all along. “The woman who found him fed him cow’s milk, which causes diarrhea and dehydration. As you well know, squirrels are lactose intolerant. “
Joe knew nothing of the sort. He hummed. Laurianne had been lactose intolerant, except for ice cream. She could always eat ice cream.
“He’s almost ready for a soft release. I’ll move his cage down below, so he can come and go at will. ” Ms. Cordero touched Joe’s arm and he regarded her pale, long fingers with some alarm. “And over here is Caliban, poor creature, caught by a cat. I had the hardest time getting Clavamox,” she said. “The vet insisted amoxicillin would do it, but you know as well as I do amoxicillin can’t kill the gram negative bacteria from a cat bite…”
Joe had never heard of amoxicillin or gram negative anything. He wished Ms. Cordero would stop showing off.
Another sensation on his arm. Her hand again. “Pups in here.” He followed her into a tiny shed. Four small cages sat on a high table. A portable heater chugged on the pea gravel floor, and skylights made the space bright. Definitely state of the art, if nursing rodents was an art.
“This one is epileptic,” Carla said, tapping on a cage. “This one was septic. So I call them Epi and Sepi. Hi little pooh’s. ” The air was close, muggy. “And these little schweeties have to go.” She reached into another cage full of shredded newspaper. “Look.” Opening her hand, she showed Joe a pink hairless thing the size of his thumb. “Only a week old,” she whispered. “His mama, killed by a car.” She plucked a cotton puff from a bowl atop the cage. “Pardon us, but such is life …” she said, and daubed at the baby’s rear end. “I lost my first two pups to uremic toxicity, before I knew you had to stimulate defecation.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Carla squinted at the cotton. “Oh good baby.” She showed him the mustard yellow squiggle. “No coxccidia, thank god,” she said.
Hands on his hips, he leaned back with an impressive, chordal creak. “How many squirrels, all told, again?”
She had pulled out another pup, but glanced up at him. “The four outside. And these pups. That’s eight.”
Two days ago, she’d said six. “And you’ve been operating here for how long, ma’am?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I found my first squirrel about a year ago. I’ve probably rescued and released eighteen or twenty… Why, is there a problem?”
“The truth is, you aren’t allowed to house so many wild animals in a residential neighborhood.”
She concentrated on the next baby. “I applied for a license as soon as I heard I needed one. Your regulations are not exactly public knowledge.”
“Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” he said.
“Am I doing something wrong? Does something not pass muster?”
He stepped back from her in that small, too-bright room. “Eight wild animals in captivity in a residential neighborhood is an illegal operation, ma’am.” Why was he taking this tack with her? Yet he couldn’t seem to help it.
“I paid for a license,” she said. “I’m licensed.”
“You applied for a license, ma’am…” For the first time, he realized he was still holding the half-full glass of water. He held it out to her.
She placed the baby back in the cage and took it. Her face was pale, and moist. Her mouth was open and he could see the glistening mound of her tongue. She seemed older, fifties, easy.
“The agency can’t just look the other way,” he said, to his own continuing dismay. “Not when this has been going on so long.” It was a relief to step outside, see the world spread out around him. “You’ll be hearing from us, ma’am, ” he said, and took the concrete steps to the next level where the garden genius, still kneeling at the sprinkler, met his glance. They shared a look of solidarity that could only refer to the woman and her unchecked displays of expertise. Joe located a side gate — thank God! — and climbed more narrow steep steps to the street. In his truck, he called dispatch. They had nothing for him so he drove home.
Part Four
He ranged through the dim, emptied out rooms. His mother was dead, dead, and once she died, things really fell apart. Laurianne, who loved May, had grown immobile with depression, then had another infection, which meant a month of almost daily trips to the emergency room. When the infection subsided, Joe’s right ball swelled up, big as a grapefruit. The doctor said it was nothing, just blocked fluid, but the routine biopsy revealed cancer cells. After his mother’s peritonitis and Laurianne’s kidney disease, who even remembered cancer? And who ever dreamed that Joe, healthiest of all of them, would get it, and that he might beat Laurianne to the grave?
A surgery, followed by days in bed and chemo, his mouth filling with sores that tasted like the cheap metal of cap guns. His fingertips and feet went numb. Laurianne heated cans of soup for him, and called the local Thai place to deliver. She called a shuttle bus to get to her dialysis. The white van took her door to door, both ways, and cost nothing. Nothing. Who knew such a thing existed? And how long had Laurianne known?
All those hours he’d stolen from work over all those years to drive her.
In the long hours of his own convalescence, the constant television made him restless, irritable. How could Laurianne spend her days in its drone, even as she read her magazines and novels? She, in turn, was brusque, irritated by his constant presence, as if he strained her hospitality.
He went back to work as soon as he could. A new volunteer was helping place the dogs. A shrub, the other officers called Regine, for her frizzy hair, long skirts and Volkswagen van. She asked to come with him on his rounds one day, and after that he invited her along for company. She’d worked in Hollywood on sets and was writing a screenplay. As they criss-crossed L.A. county, she told Joe the plot, whose main character, a female detective, also rescued dogs, vaccinating and rehabbing them, then, using a lengthy, grotesquely selective evaluation process, placed them in homes. The detective, however, would make clever use of this evaluation form to find clues about her cases.
She took him to her house for lunch, a small clapboard cottage in Echo Park, where she made food he didn’t know existed, tomatoes sliced with leaves on them and a thick sweet vinegar poured on top; flat spaghetti with a gritty green paste that smelled and tasted like crashing through delta swamps in the spring.
Joe ate a handful of chips, then sat at the piano, plunked out a few bars of Red River Valley.
Regine had been to college, she had degrees, she was a writer, but she never clubbed him over the head with how smart she was.
In fact, she’d gone on the Internet and read all the newspaper articles about him, all the times he’d been interviewed, and said that he was smart. Quite smart. And sexy.
Joe froze, as he had when she said that. The piano went silent. He’d pretended not to hear her. He was married. He and Regine were friends, only ever friends, and what was wrong with that? After all those years he’d cared for Laurianne, wasn’t he entitled to something for himself before he died?
When it became obvious that he would in fact live, the news seemed connected to Regine. It was she who’d drawn him back from the terrifying, isolated shore of dying and into to the bustling, delicious world of the living.
Laurianne, of course, noted his never coming home for lunch, his not driving her to dialysis. “You better not bring me a disease, Joe, not with my immune system,” she said. Let her think what she liked. It was toxic time all the time at their house, yet he would keep her housed, fed and healthy to the best of his ability, as he had contracted to do.
But then she died. He came home one night after a long beer with Regine to find Laurianne in crisis. The routine interventions did not help. Infections raged. In the hospital, she had a small stroke, and another. A respirator breathed for her. She mocked his pep talks. “It’s over, Joe,” she said. He sat by her bed for four days and nights. She waited until he left the room to die.
She died. Died.
Joe grieved by working, arriving early, staying late. Alone, he drove all over the county gathering lost dogs and feral cats, abandoned pets and road kill. He trapped problem skunks, raccoons and possums. Evenings, he drove to Franklin Park and hiked the trails, hoping to see his old adversary’s scabrous ass. He felt eerily blank around Regine and after he turned down several invitations to lunch, she let him be. He bought flowers for two graves. He located piano keys under stacks of unopened mail and plunked until Marino’s television roared. He slept in graying sheets on the hospital bed.
Six, seven months after Laurianne’s death, his eye caught a phone number stenciled on a blue dumpster. He dialed the number, ordered a bin of his own. The guy who dropped it off assured Joe that nothing of value would make it to the landfill. He filled the thing three times, with plastic bedpans, cases of Ensure, more than a hundred brown plastic prescription bottles; then Laurianne’s clothes, her doll and tea cup collections, shelves of fat, tattered fantasy novels and New Age self help books, more clothes. He tossed and cleaned and sorted and spelled himself on the piano. When the last bin was finally gone, he dragged the couch and hospital bed to the curb and overnight, they disappeared.
He asked Regine to help him buy new furniture. They went to Ikea, and the Macy’s warehouse where, sitting on a red chenille sofa, she told Joe that she had a new boyfriend, whom she loved. Joe was sorry, but not surprised, for what good-natured, healthy woman would want a stout hybrid Cajun with one testicle, and one gift, and that for sharpshooting?
Part Five
Two younger Prairie Street handlers flanked him as he rapped on Carla Cordero’s front door. She answered promptly, as if she’d been awaiting them. She wore all form-fitted black, and lipstick, yes. Had she known he was coming? Busty as hell, she ushered them in without a word. The living room was full of women, five or six of them, her age and younger. All the dark wood tables were strewn with half drunk cups of coffee, crumb-strewn saucers, clumps of muffin. A coffee klatch, he guessed, and a flash went off.
“What’s going on?”
A man with a camera stepped through the kitchen doorway.
“Officer La Croix?” Carla Cordero presented to him a short, bespectacled woman with a legal pad. “This is Andrea Butterman. She’s with the Times. And Rob — I forgot your last name? He’s the photographer on the story…”
Story? “I’m here to pick up the squirrels, ma’am,” Joe said. “I’d appreciate your cooperation.”
“They’re gone,” Carla said. “They’ve been placed in safe houses.”
Safe houses. “I must ask you to show me the cages,” he said.
“You know the way.” She waved vaguely toward the backyard.
The two handlers followed him down the steps. The cages were gone. Only the long, shingled structure remained. The shade arbor. In the shed, one hamster-sized cage.
“You two,” he barked at the handlers crowding in behind him. “Wait for me in the truck.” They stumbled out, pausing to admire the view, point out the switching yard, the river, the Home Depot. “Now!” Joe yelled.
He considered confiscating the remaining cage but wasn’t sure that was legal. For that matter, taking the squirrels might not have been precisely by the book. He tilted the cage lest any pink baby tumble from its shredded paper nest. Nothing. Ms. Cordero might have outfoxed him, but she’d possibly saved him some legal awkwardness. Still! He shoved the cage away. Safe houses! Safe houses! As if he were a batterer, an abuser.
The female reporter startled Joe as he left the shed. “Excuse me, Mr. La Croix,” she said. “Would you like to tell your side of the story?”
“I got no side,” Joe said. “There is no story. Ms. Cordero had eight wild animals in captivity in a residential neighborhood.”
“Had there been complaints from the neighbors, sir?”
“I am not aware of any complaints, no,” said Joe.
“And she obtained a license, is that correct?”
“I don’t care squat about a license,” said Joe. “She talked too much. And no amount of hundred dollar words could make that operation legal. ”
The reporter wrote assiduously. Joe didn’t wait for her next question. He took the steps two at a time.
* * *
Regine handed him the newspaper in the break room the next morning. “Can’t say you came off too well in this one, Joe.”
A wide-angle shot centered on his admittedly large gut, with gun and badge on show. His sunglasses, which were not mirrored, appeared to be so from the star-shaped flash reflected in each eye. In short, he looked a backwoods cracker sheriff. Below the fold, Ms. Cordero hadn’t fared much better. Her nose wasn’t so shovel-shaped or her eyes so uneven. “She’s a lot better looking than this,” he told Regine, and took the paper to his cubicle.
The first time he’d seen his name and face in print, he’d been amazed that Joe La Croix of St. Bernard’s Parish, whose highest grade in all of school had been a soaring B minus, would be quoted in a newspaper read by millions. He’d since been quoted with regularity and the wonder had dulled. Writers always got something wrong, a fact, a name, a direct quote, a spelling. Sometimes, they twisted what he said to make their points.
…Convinced that La Croix would confiscate the squirrels, Cordero distributed the animals to several undisclosed locations.
La Croix seemed offended by Cordero’s expertise and enthusiasm. “She talked too much,” La Croix said. “Used hundred dollar words.”
Regine slipped into his office. “You okay?”
“She was using all this medical dog Latin.“
“Sounds like she was trying to impress you.”
“She was making me feel stupid.”
Regine smiled at the floor. “But you aren’t stupid, Joe,” she said, with her reliable, generous sweetness. “Though in this case, you’re pathetic.”
Joe picked up two strays, a Dalmatian and a pit mix, and ate four greasy ground beef tacos for lunch in his truck cab. He thought it best to stay clear of the office. But his boss radioed, called him in. “Why were you so goddamn defensive?” he said. “Next time, talk to me before shutting anyone down. You know these crackpots. You’re lucky she didn’t call C-fucking-NN.”
Dispatch had nothing more for him so he drove to the Franklin Library, and hiked up the canyon, letting himself through two restricted access gates. A mile up, under an oak, he found a leg trap tripped, the usual tarry, fur bound excrement curled atop the mechanism.
He kicked it clean, set the trap anew, tipping the beef jerky from its plastic bag without touching it, then walked off fifty yards and hunkered down to watch the day fade. A low lying haze clotted the city grid like accumulated lint. The hum of traffic played against insects whining in the chaparral. He tried but could not recall what set him off two days ago at the shade arbor. He’d been so aware, in her presence, of his bayou trashiness, his minor civil servant-hood, his failures as a helpmeet; it was as he’d been overrun, crowded out by the other, more ignoble persons in his skin.
On the next ridge over, clumps of sage and sugar bushes and wild buckwheat began to thrash. Then, as if coalescing out of leaves and branches, an animal emerged. And another. Given their size, agility and speed, and big bat-ears, they could only be coyotes. They flung something back and forth, one leapt to catch it, the other plunged into the bushes after it fell. A dead rodent, he assumed, but as they came out of shadow, he saw it was a ball, a fluorescent yellow tennis ball. More leaps, their scrawny long bodies twisting in mid-air.
Even after the coyotes melted into the darkening smoke-colored brush, the ball soared out of the brush, three, then four times more, in zany arcs.
The sky was orange as Joe walked down the trail. The hills of Griffith Park to the west were black silhouettes. He drove down Chevy Chase. The white mercury vapor streetlights flickered on, their halos purple. Brake lights and stoplights were especially bright and clean in the deepening twilight. Near the cemetery, florists were pulling buckets of lilies and sunflowers inside for the night. Joe swung over. In one bright shop, amid the rumbling refrigerators and bracing eucalyptus-spiked air, he found lilacs, the first of the season, fat spumes of tiny blossoms bursting from buckets. They were crazy-expensive, and they filled the cab of his truck with their old-fashioned bath soap scent.
Joe drove past the cemetery gates without turning in. At the next stoplight, he put a protective arm out to keep the lilacs from pitching to the floor. He’d bought four bundles, a hefty armload; enough so that, when Ms. Cordero first opened her door, she would see nothing but lilacs, lilacs, lilacs.
